Sublime beauty: Henry James and the ethical aesthetic (Paul De Man).

摘要

This dissertation analyzes three acts by three heroines in Henry James in an attempt to advance a continuing ethical role for the aesthetic in the wake of De Mans powerful critique of aesthetic reconciliation. When, at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel chooses to return to Osmond, when similarly, in The Wings of the Dove, Milly sacrifices her life to prevent knowledge of Kate's and Densher's engagement from getting out, and when, in the short story “The Altar of the Dead,” James's unnamed woman first categorically insists upon and then reverses her demand that Stransom light the missing candle for Hague, each heroine, I suggest, performs an act that is ethical in Kant's sense, that is, an act designed to guarantee our transcendental freedom.; In the first two cases, I show how a non-reconciling aesthetic aids James's heroines in performing these acts. For Isabel, a form of aesthetic perception, founded upon a certain failure to see the totality, underwrites her decision which, I suggest, represents a defense of the limit of phenomenal knowledge. Milly's decision to “turn her face to the wall” acts upon a similar determination when, in her hysterical staging of the primary aesthetic narrative of the Christian sacrifice, she installs herself as the aesthetic object whose function is to preserve the limit of our representational field.; Yet, in “The Altar of the Dead,” James suggests that the aesthetic guaranteeing of the limit must, for ethical reasons, be allowed to self-deconstruct. The consequences of this act are not, however, to return us to the total symbolic determination that follows from the De Manian aesthetic critique. For James shows how a specifically feminine ethic, founded upon a structural impossibility and bearing affinities both with the way Lacan conceives of the feminine “structure of sexuation,” and with the Kantian mathematical sublime, can act as an alternative grounding for transcendental freedom. The discussion concludes with some comments regarding the relation between the ethics of deconstruction and of Lacanian psychonanalysis by situating the two discourses within the Kantian aesthetic framework of the beautiful and the sublime.